A big success in a little boat

DETROIT -- The America's Cup requires $50-million budgets, boats the size of houses, bigger crews than a football team, and enough sails to make drapes for Cobo Hall.

Entire teams of designers spend the three or four years between regattas using supercomputers and the scientific resources of their national space agencies and navies to look for technological advances that will give their sailors a speed edge.

Then there's the boat called the Sunfish, virtually unchanged since the first one was pushed into the water in 1951 and, at 130 pounds, considerably lighter than most of the people who race it.

In a Sunfish race, one sailor with one tiny boat and one small sail pits his knowledge and tactical skills against as many as 100 others who have the identical boat and sail.

Which is just the way Derrick Fries likes it. A mild-mannered Avondale Middle School principal, Fries has won two Sunfish world championships (along with four world titles in the slightly bigger Force Five), and he finds little more pleasurable than competing in what he calls ''that amazingly complex, non-static chess game'' that is a sailboat race.

Fries, 48, had been out of serious competitive racing for eight years, tied up by the demands of raising a family and earning his doctorate at Michigan while carrying on a career as an educator.

But he missed the challenge of competing against many of the best sailors in the world, and when he saw that the Sunfish North American Championships were going to be held near Chicago earlier this month, he decided to load his 18-year-old boat on top of his van and see whether he still had the skill to compete at such a high level. Surprising everyone, but mostly himself, Fries won the event and now has to decide whether to go to the Sunfish Worlds at the Caribbean island of Antigua in October.

''I don't know if I should,'' he said during a recent fun sail aboard his Sunfish on Clarkston's Deer Lake, a few hundred yards from his home. ''As a principal, you expect your staff to come to work every day. It's kind of hard to justify the principal going off to Antigua to race little boats.''

The Sunfish is 13 feet, 9 inches long, 4-feet-1 wide, and carries a 75-square-foot sail. Unlike most modern sailboats that carry a Bermuda rig, where the sail is shaped like a right triangle, with the 90-degree angle at the bottom forward corner, the Sunfish uses a lateen rig that has been around for 1,000 years, with the pointy end sticking forward of the mast.

The Sunfish fleet has been a training ground for some of the best sailors in the world, like Americans Gary Jobson, Paul Cayard, Gary Hoyt and Tom Lihan, Canada's Hans Fogh, Australia's John Bertrand, and Denmark's Paul Elvstrom, considered by many to be the best racing sailor ever.

The Sunfish is the most successful sailboat in the world. More than 250,000 have been built since 1951, and that doesn't count ''splash-offs,'' thousands of boats built all over the world by manufacturers who simply used a Sunfish hull as a mold to steal the design.

It evolved from the Sailfish, a similar-sized boat that had a flat deck like a surfboard. When the designer's pregnant wife found it difficult to sit on the flat deck with her legs tucked under her growing stomach, he went back to the drawing board and came up with a boat that had a tiny cockpit for her feet -- the Sunfish.

''One of the things I like best about this class is that anyone can take part in it,'' Fries said. ''You can buy a new boat for about $2,700. But where a boat's only competitive for a couple of years in most classes, you can sail a Sunfish for years and still win. If you just want something to play around on the lake with, you can pick one up at a garage sale for $500.''

All Sunfish hulls are pulled off the same mold at Vanguard Sailboats in Portsmouth, R.I., and all the sails come from the same manufacturer. Small modifications are allowed in the lines that rig the sail and the daggerboards (a keel that the sailor moves up and down by hand), but adding every modification allowed wouldn't add $100 to the boat.

With its reinforced keel and kick-up rudder, the Sunfish was designed as a beach boat, and while it's not very fast, it is ideal for someone who wants a boat that rigs quickly (under 10 minutes), can be carried on a car top, uses the minimum number of lines, and is nearly bulletproof. It carries two adults or an adult and a couple of children, and it is an excellent training boat for kids moving up from beginner boats like the Optimist pram.

But the Sunfish has two personalities. The simplicity that makes it attractive to casual sailors means that it responds to tiny differences in the way it is rigged and sailed.

''It's really a much more complex rig than a Laser,'' Fries said of a popular high-performance dinghy about the same size and weight. ''Very small adjustments will make a major difference in your finishing position. I enjoy that.''

Fries, who has won 15 national and world championships in several dinghy classes, has written two of the best how-to-sail books available -- ''Start Sailing Right,'' the instructional manual of the U.S. Sailing Association, and ''Successful Sunfish Racing.''

At this year's North American Championships, second place went to Donald Martinborough of the Bahamas and third to Eduardo Cordero of Venezuela, a five-time Sunfish world champion.

For more information about the Sunfish, see the Vanguard Web site at www.teamvanguard.com/sunfish or call 800-966-7245.

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(c) 2001, Detroit Free Press.

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